EVEN though it was almost 150 years ago (March 8, 1857), that some women workers in the garment and textile industries staged an organized protest in New York to draw attention to their poor pay and pathetic working conditions, very little improvement has actually occurred in their lives.

The United Nations international conferences dealing with women’s problems have also yielded few effective action programmes that the participating governments were supposed to implement to ameliorate the women’s conditions in any significant manner.

Under these circumstances, should we continue to designate a particular day as the women’s day? To this question my answer as a development economist is ‘yes,’ but let me hasten to add that the important point is not to designate a day on women’s development issue but to think about the subject-matter seriously and address the same vigorously.

In South Asia colossal gender insensitivity is a fact of life. Even five years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, women are miles behind men in every walk of life: the job market, government offices, educational institutions and business enterprises.

The grim picture of women’s conditions is dotted with horrific facts: Pakistan and India have one of the most distorted sex ratios in the world — there are only 900 females for every one thousand males in Pakistan and 930 in India; adult female literacy rates as a percentage of males are 48 and 58; female primary enrolment as a percentage of male are 55 and 66 in Pakistan and India respectively.

More importantly, the ranking of the gender empowerment measure developed by the UNDP in 1997 showed Pakistan at the second lowest out of 102 countries and India at 95th position in the index. The majority of South Asian women work in the informal sector with pathetic pay scales or as unpaid family helpers.

The latest calculations reported in the Mahbubul Haq Human Development Centre’s report on Human Development in South Asia 2000, show that the Gender related development Index (GDI) in South Asia (0.51) was very low by world standards and the same in Pakistan (0.47) was lower than the South Asian average.

The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) which highlights the extent to which women are involved in political and economic activities, showed an average of 0.24 for South Asia and a meagre 0.18 for Pakistan.

The same was true with respect to the Human Development Index (HDI) that showed South Asian Index at 0.64 and Pakistan’s at 0.51. An important point to note is that since the GDI is lower than the HDI, women have both lower overall achievement in Human Development and even lower achievement than men.

The sad fact is that women’s contribution to household maintenance, the informal sector markets, where 65% to 95% of economically active women are involved, and family care are not even included in systems of national accounts. Even in the agricultural sector women have a heavy work load in such areas as crops farming, livestock husbandry and off-farm activities but much of their work goes unrecognized and unappreciated. It is not surprising then that women’s basic human rights are denied and inequality is maintained at a wide arrange of their involvement. Why is this so?

One basic reason is that the legal terrain is particularly rough for women in South Asia. Even though there are constitutional guarantees for women’s legal equality, the existing laws and customs defy such equality in practice and relegate women’s right to sham. Discrimination has become “normal” in this part of the world.

Women in South Asia generally and in Pakistan particularly face heavy barriers in their access to health services. That is why there are 480 deaths per 100,000 live births in South Asia compared with 13 in industrialized countries. AT the same time most of them suffer from chronic energy deficiency because they do not receive even the minimum daily requirements of 2250 calories.

In the education sector, the average rate of female literacy in South Asia rose from 17 to 37 per cent whereas the same shot up from 32 to 63 per cent in the developing countries during 1970-1997. A large number of barriers to girls education such as the shortage of teachers, single-sex schools, travel distance to schools are well known in this part of the world. What is generally not recognized is the unpleasant fact that these barriers have become virtually insurmountable hurdles to higher, vocational and technical education.

The tragic fact is that we have yet to recognize the importance of female education. The internationally reputed experts have stated that there is no greater catalyst for social and economic progress than female education. Let me quote a few well researched facts:

* The contribution to economic growth by education and skills ie the human capital in South Asia (76 per cent) is overwhelmingly large when compared with the contribution made by physical capital consisting of machines, buildings and economic infrastructure (15 per cent) and that made by natural resource capital (9 per cent).

* The social rates of return (RR) to education in Asia are large: primary, 20 per cent; secondary, 13 per cent and higher education, 12 per cent.

* The doubling of female secondary education would reduce the infant mortality rate from 84 to 31 per cent per thousand or about 64 per cent. In contrast, the doubling of per capita income would reduce it only by 6 per cent and the doubling of the number of doctors would decrease it by 5 per cent.

* Education dramatically enhances women’s confidence. In a survey in Bangladesh the women were asked whether they would go to a political meeting alone and the answers were in the following order: with no education, 4 per cent; with primary education, 7 per cent; with secondary education, 18 per cent and college education, 46 per cent.

* Throughout South Asia, there is significant impact of women’s schooling on the age at marriage, the desired family size and awareness of family planning and human welfare.

A number of other research findings on the importance of education for women could have been enumerated, but the above should suffice to convince concerned citizens and policy makers that this topic should have been on the top of our national priorities list.

Unfortunately this was not done with the result that we have very little to our credit on the ground. The first Five-Year Plan (1955-60) stated that we would achieve “free and compulsory education” by 1995. The “score-card” shows a total failure — 37 per cent of the boys and 55 per cent of the girls in the primary school age population are out of schools. More than 50 per cent of the children drop out